


The Cost

by abreathofsnowandashes



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M, Mentions: Frank Randall, Mentions: Malva Christie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-20 14:05:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11337024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abreathofsnowandashes/pseuds/abreathofsnowandashes
Summary: As an accusation threatens to tear Jamie and Claire apart, they are forced to face their past, present and future.





	The Cost

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr at abreathofsnowandashes.tumblr.com
> 
> Two things you should know, firstly there are spoilers for major happenings in book 6,  A Breath of Snow and Ashes. This fic takes place the night after Malva Christie accuses Jamie of getting her pregnant and Jamie subsequently tells Claire about sleeping with Mary McNab. It may be worth reading that section again if it isn’t fresh in your mind. It’s around page 1000, in the printed book.
> 
> Secondly, and don’t freak out, but I’ve always thought that Claire having suppressed her natural, sexual self once back in the 20th century, may have dipped her toe in that pool again after Frank died. I’ve wrapped it all up in Jamie, so don’t worry. Just go with it, there’s pay off, I swear. __  
> 
> 
> * * *

_“She gave me tenderness,” he said finally, so softly that I barely heard him. “I - I hope I gave her the same.” \- Jamie, A Breath of Snow and Ashes_

* * *

“Jamie?”

She found him sitting at the end of the bed still wearing his kilt and shirt, staring out into the May night while two rigid fingers tapped out his agitation against his thigh. It had been a full day since Malva Christie had laid her claim at their feet and the sense of dazed devastation had yet to relinquish its hold.

“Mmm?” he answered half-heartedly, keeping his gaze fixed on the sky outside the window.

Claire sat down beside him in her shift and took his hand in hers, it was the first time they had purposefully touched each other since returning from the spring the night before.

“Is something the matter… apart from the obvious, that is.” His mouth twitched in slight amusement or perhaps it was a grimace of pain. This whole business shamed him in ways she knew he would never find expression for.

“It’s nothing really, Sassenach. I’ve just been thinking about what ye said, yesterday, about how ye knew what I meant when I spoke about Mary McNab. I just wondered if maybe it was you and Frank that ye meant… that he gave ye tenderness, too?”

“Oh.”

The tension in his shoulders relaxed and his back straightened once released from the burden of having to say the words.

“Aye. _Oh_.”

Claire felt suddenly very uncomfortable and could feel the heat of shame rise in her cheeks, which often happened when she thought about Frank. She struggled to find the right words to respond, stumbling over herself. “Um… no, no. Frank and I… there wasn’t a great deal of tenderness between us once I returned.”

She paused for a moment, thinking, and then added, “Save for Bree.”

Every muscle in Jamie’s body tensed, he gripped Claire’s hand tightly and turned to look at her.

“Was he cruel to ye, Sassenach?” his voice was low and calm, but she could see in the narrowing of his eyes that there was violence buried deep within, balanced dangerously on an edge.

“No, no Jamie, not in the way you are imagining,” Claire rushed to respond. She squeezed his hand to reassure him but she still found herself no better equipped to articulate the unhappiness that existed between her and Frank. She tried very hard not to think on it, especially now that it was over, but when she did, it was impossible to not feel that blanket of hurt and shame settle upon her her once again.

“I broke his heart.”

She had never said the words out loud, but had known it as deeply as she knew her own name, known it since she stood on a hill and made a choice. She let the words settle for a moment on their own, accepting the bald truth of them. “When I returned, pregnant and distraught and so deeply yours… I broke his heart. And I couldn’t - _wouldn’t_ \- be sorry for it. I’m still not.”

He bowed his head for a moment and thought of his own heart, of what being wrenched from Claire had done to it. If she had returned to him loving another man? Came back to give news of a daughter but not wanting him? What would he have become? The thought of it caused panic to rise in his chest like a fist and he took a deep breath to forcibly push it away.

Silently, he minded himself to offer up a prayer for the soul of Frank Randall.

“So, was it no until ye found me in Edinburgh that you had that again?”

A shadowed look came over Claire’s face and she suddenly became very interested in smoothing down her hair.

“Um…, well no, there was… that is… the year after Frank died, I… there was one night with a gentleman that was quite nice.”

Silence enveloped the room and Claire was sure she could hear the beating of his heart and the grinding of his teeth in his clenched jaw.

He stood up suddenly and loomed over her, his face making no effort to hide his hurt and disbelief.

“Another man bedded ye?” he made a good show of seeming calm but there was a barely controlled menace in his voice.

He moved away from her and began pacing the room, unable to contain the feeling boiling within him.

“Well, it was more me bedding him, truth be told, but–” her hands flew to her mouth. She had the words out before she could stop them and the stunned look on his face brought her up short.

“Oh I’m sorry Jamie, I didn’t mean to be flippant, it’s just…”

He cut her off, “Who was he?”

“No one important, I barely–”

“Who. Was. He.”

Claire sighed, defeated.

“He was a surgeon,” she said in a low, muffled tone. “I was at a conference, for work. The night before I was due to fly back to Boston I was having a drink at the bar of the hotel I was staying in and a young doctor sat down beside me. He was about 35 or so, I believe.”

“Did you love him, Claire?”

She sat up bolt straight in astonishment.

“Love him? Dear Lord no, Jamie! It was only one night. I honestly barely remember him.”

He released a breath and nodded but he could not let it lie.

“I need ye to tell me.”

“Tell you?” Claire blanched noticeably.

“What happened that night, with yon… _gentleman_.” He spat the last word out as if it was the filthiest thing he’d ever heard in his life.

“Jamie, I–”

“I had to tell ye of Mary and now ye need to tell me of this. I canna wonder, Claire.”

Resigned to her fate, Claire nodded and sat for a minute, thinking back to that hotel bar and tried to recall the night’s events. After a moment a memory sprang forth and she was hit with a pang of loneliness deeper than anything she had felt in years. Her throat tightened and her voice grew small as she recounted a long forgotten night of a long forgotten life.

* * *

“It was his hands that I noticed at first. Surgeons always notice the hands. His reminded me of yours.” She looked at him and smiled sadly.  “They were broad in the palm with long, strong fingers. Good hands for a surgeon.” Her voice took on a far-a-away note as the memory seemed to come clearer in her mind. “I don’t know why they made me think of this particular memory but they did, and well… I very badly wanted to feel those hands upon me.”

Jamie’s eyes burned into her. Outside an owl’s call echoed around the Ridge but there, in their room, they were wrapped in the oppressive stillness usually felt before a storm.

“Which memory, Claire?” Jamie asked her, quietly.

“Do you remember in Leoch, not long after we married, it was evening time, you had been in the stables all day and had met me by chance on the way to supper?”

Recognition dawned in him and he felt the soft flutter of longing in his wame.

“Aye, I remember. Ye had been tending yer wee herbs in the garden and yer hair was sprung out all about yer head, as if I had been ravishing ye.”

Their eyes met in shared memory and his heart clenched and his balls with it.

Their words became whispers, as though they were back roving Leoch’s winding halls, bodies alight and burning for each other.

“I snuck ye away into some dark corridor, I couldna wait, I had to have ye.”

Unbeknownst to himself, he was moving towards her. Like magnets, their bodies pulling together.

“You spun me around, rucked up my skirts and took me against the wall.”

His heart thundered in his chest.

“Ye were already wet, ye told me ye’d been thinking of me while at yer work. When I entered ye I had to put my hand over yer mouth to muffle the sounds ye made.”

“ _Christ, yes_ ,” she gasped.

He was on fire. He watched as Claire trembled with the memory and had to grasp the desk behind her to steady herself. He was only inches away from her by now, hovering close enough that he could feel the heat of her body. He moved as if to kiss her and they both leaned into each other, panting. His hands itched to touch her, to claim her. If he wanted, he could reach out and have her bent over the bed in a heartbeat. It took all his will to keep his hands clenched by his sides.

“For years, when I was in Boston, I would wake in the night, calling to you, having dreamt of a moment like that, shaken and wet and aching for your touch. Your kiss.”

_Oh Claire, mo chridhe._

She reached up and ghosted her fingertips over his mouth.

He gasped at her touch but stood back, he would not put hands on her until he had the truth. The moment broke and her hand fell away from him.

“I hadn’t had a dream like that in a long time. Frank hated it and then medical school and Brianna and residency, I didn’t seem to have time for dreams any longer. I think perhaps I’d forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?” he asked softly.

“What it felt like to have a man’s hands on me and have it not sting of betrayal. To kiss lips that didn’t linger with the taste of accusation.”

He had to dig his fingers deep into his palms to stop himself from reaching for her.

“That night, at that bar, I realised I could possibly feel those things again.”

_So wanting…_

Unbidden, Jamie recalled the chill of the marriage bed he shared with Laoghaire MacKenzie, of the unending chasm of frigid space between them.

_Twenty years of such a winter._

The thought crawled up his spine as if someone had walked across his grave.

“The young man must have noticed my staring because he came to sit beside me and bought me a drink. We chatted for a bit, about work and the conference. But it was all pretense, we both knew what was going on. He finished his drink, put his hand on my thigh, raised a brow in question and before I knew it, we were on our way up to my room.”

“Christ! That was wicked careless of ye, Sassenach. Anything could have happened to ye!” He threw his hands up in the air in frustration and resumed his pacing.

“It wasn’t like that, darling. It was… nice. I was in control of the situation the entire time!”

“Mmmphmm!”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“Would you like me to show you?”

He froze where he stood and slowly turned to look at her.

“Show me?”

“What that night was like, with that young man.”

He was fully facing her now.

“You want to… to…”

She nodded, handing his words back to him, “So you don’t have to wonder.”

“Claire…” it was a warning, he was on the edge of something and she knew it. She walked towards him, stopping a few inches in front of him and put her hands on the front of his belt.

“Everything I did with that man,” she said softly, “I will do to you.”

Jamie’s nostrils flared and he snorted in dismissal, but a faint flush rose on his cheeks that eventually reached the tops of his ears.

She stood back one step and removed the binding in her hair and let it fall down about her shoulders in the way that made his knees tremble.

“That’s cheating, Sassenach, and ye know it.”

She raised her eyebrow in challenge to him and his eyes dilated with lust and something else, something primal.

She stepped into him again and buried her mouth into his neck, whispering in his ear as her hands pulled his belt lose. “He was so eager, so willing. He trembled as I took his clothes off.”

Jamie felt as those a fire had been lit in his bones. His breathing grew shallow and laboured as Claire removed his clothes. The touch of her hands, warm and firm against him when she removed his shirt, drove him mad, as though he was an animal, caged in his own skin. Her hands returned to his waist, her fingers sliding under the lip of his kilt, slowly, slowly pulling it free of his body, leaving him standing before her naked and hard.

She stood back and looked at him, her head tilted to one side, considering. “He was different from you, softer, leaner, but you shared a certain… _honesty_.” Her eyes lingered on his cock, straining towards his stomach. She looked up, her bottom lip caught between her teeth in thought and he felt the heavy, insistent pressure build in his balls.

“He wanted to touch me, to take my clothes off, but I wouldn’t let him. Instead I made him lay down and watch me.”

_Jesus God._

She inclined her head for him to lie down and he moved to obey. From his new position prone across the bed, he looked down the length of his naked body to find her framed between the V of his slightly parted thighs. First her right and then her left, she slipped her shift off her shoulders and it fell to the floor in a gentle flutter of material. He groaned loudly and his hips jerked up involuntarily. His cock twitched at the sight of her, breasts supple and flushed to such lovely red peaks that it made his mouth water. He couldn’t hold it at bay any longer, the  tremendous pressure in his cock and balls dimmed his awareness of anything but the need to be surrounded by her, soft and wet and burning.

He tried to reach for her but she seized his hands in mid air and straddled him while she placed each arm firmly above his head. “No touching.” He nodded dumbly and she sucked on his earlobe, making him gasp, “There’s a good lad,” she said, grinning wickedly.

She moved to journey back down the length of his body and paused, here and there, to taste him. “He smelled of cigarettes but tasted of salt and soap,” she murmured into his skin. “Like he could have been anyone.” Her mouth hot and wet on his neck, his nipple, the ticklish patch of skin just below his ribs. Down, down, down she went until she was sucking the skin of his lower abdomen into her mouth. Jamie was gone, incapable of coherent thought. He was no more than a writhing mass of bone and muscle on the bed, hips lifting up, begging for her attention.

“He was so very responsive, bucking up against me and straining for my touch. When I put my mouth here,” she demonstrated with a feather touch as she slowly drew the tip of her finger up from the base of his cock all the way to the head, “he gasped for breath.”

She retraced the path of her finger with her tongue, licking him from root to tip. He gulped audibly and began panting as he struggled for air.

“Mmm yes, just like that,” Claire said, looking up and grinning at him lasciviously. She immediately set back to her work, taking him more fully into her mouth, sucking and humming contentedly.

“Jesus, Mary and Saint Joseph,” Jamie hissed. He could feel his balls drawing close to his body, approaching the point of no return. Claire continued to tend to him with her mouth. She brought a hand to cup his balls in her palm and gently pulled down on them, halting Jamie’s orgasm. He cried out in surprise and she looked up at him and said simply, “Not yet.”

The bed creaked as his grip on the sideboard tightened. Claire released him from her mouth and moved up to straddle his waist, hovering just above him, one hand on his heart, the other on his cock, as she has always held him. She ran her hand up and down the length of him, slowly, pulling back the foreskin and revealing the mushroom head on the down stroke. He moaned below her, body bent with every muscle tensed to straining. Finding her rhythm she teased him, rubbing the exposed, sensitive tip of his cock along the wet slit between her legs until it grazed over her clit and they hissed and gasped together.

_Once._

_Twice._

_Three times._

Arms still above his head, Jamie strained up against her, desperately seeking to join their bodies, certain he would die if he didn’t get inside her.

“He begged me,” she said, as she moved to bring his cock to her once more.

“Claire, please. Please now, Claire…” Jamie pleaded, totally lost in the feel of her hands on him.

“He begged me and then I rode him.”

Finally, she pulled the tip of his cock to her opening and slid slowly down, pulling him inside her.

“ _Jesus Christ, yes_ ” he exclaimed, his eyes rolling back in his head from the wave of sensation that rippled up under his skin, from his balls to his chest. She took his hands and placed them on her hips and then leaned down upon him, her palms flat against his chest as she found her pace. She rode him at a gallop, grinding herself against him. “Yes, Jamie, yesyesyeyesyes.”  


He moved a hand to the place where their bodies were joined and with the pad of his thumb grazed the bundle of nerves above her opening. She froze and gasped his name and then she was shaking, riding him frantically to completion. The contractions within her held his cock like a vice, making his eyes cross. Freed now from her demands he pulled her to him and flipped them over.

“My turn.”

* * *

Her heartbeat had not yet found its normal rhythm again and he had her on her back, her legs pulled wide in the air and her ankles grasped in his outstretched hands as he slammed into her. There was no sound in the room but the slapping of his balls against her backside as he set a driving pace.

She moaned and tossed her head from side to side on the pillow. Her skin felt too tight on her bones. She needed him closer, deeper, _inside, inside, inside_.

And yet, he was more than she could bear. He filled her, surrounded her and she couldn’t find the end of herself and the beginning of him. “Jamie please… it's… Oh god, it’s so much.”

He paused, balls deep and shaking with the need to move, and looked at her, “Do you want me to stop, Claire?”

Her breath came quick, her chest heaving with the rapid beating of her heart. “No,  no, Christ no, please, don’t stop,” she said, almost frantic to feel the friction within her once more and moved her hips against him, demanding his response.

“Aye,” he said, chuckling, “As you wish,” and so he didn’t stop. Instead he lay her legs atop his shoulders and bent even closer, deepening his penetration. She gasped sharply and exclaimed in surprise. His lips moved to her ear. “I mean to be so deep inside ye, ye’ll  have the taste of me in the back of yer throat. I want to make it so that when ye remember that night again, it’s my hands you feel on yer hips, my cock ye feel inside ye, tis me that ye ride.” Her eyes rolled back in her head as his words vibrated within her and she began to mumble incoherently, “Jamie please… Oh God, please… Jamie…” She didn’t know what she was asking for only that she wanted more. More of him, more of this feeling building inside her, wiping all other awareness clear in her mind, leaving only the pinpoint of white hot pleasure centred between her legs and the fluttering tendrils of the sensation echoing in her stomach.

Jamie held her hands above her head, wrist over wrist. Her bones, delicate and bird like, rubbed together every time he moved inside her.

“Did ye speak to him? The boy, when ye bed him?” His voice seemed very far away, the pleasure inside her was running away from her control, with every thrust of his hips it grew deeper and wider and she feared it would wash her away with its force.

When she didn’t answer he ceased his movements and the shift in rhythm brought her back to the surface of awareness. She snapped her hips at him insistently and looked at him, obscenely furious in a way that only someone on the cusp of a completion that is cruelly denied, can look. Slowly and deliberately he moved out of her and then back in with a firm pump of his hips, “I asked ye a question, Sassenach.” She nodded, hips rising to meet him once more as his rhythm returned. “Mmmm, yes, you bastard, yes.”

His grip tightened, “What did ye say. Tell me.” He punctuated the last word with a firm thrust that made her gasp.

_Oh God._

He bent his mouth to her neck and sucked her pulse as it throbbed under his tongue. She moaned his name and her back bent like a bow.

“Just… _oh God yes, do that again_ … instructions.”

His mouth moved lower, circling her nipple with his tongue.

“Like what?”

He moved to the other one, his hand now gently framing the teacup of her breast as he took it into his mouth.

“Harder’, ‘faster’… _fucking hell_ … ‘More’.”

He smiled around her breast and released it, leaving a trail of kisses across her chest, along the hollow of her clavicle until he reached her neck and sucked the pulse so that it made her toes curl.

“And if it had been me ye found at that Bar, me ye had taken to your bed. Would ye have bid me the same?”

Dear God, the idea of picking him up in a bar. She could see him, his hair slicked back neatly and his glorious body compact and smoothly defined in a tailored suit. She imagined his palm on her thigh, the room full of people and his hand sliding up and up and up. Claire was barely coherent at the thought of it.

“No.” she shook her head, when she finally answered him, helpless with the feel of him, the fact of him, pulsing inside her.

“Then what, Claire?”

She stopped struggling against him and his hips stilled in response. She moved her hands from his grasp above her head and cupped his cheek in her palm, holding him gently, as though he was something delicate and precious.

“‘I would have told you ‘I love you’,’” she said softly.

The words cut through to the core of him and something strong and vital cracked within in his chest, pouring his heart and soul out of him and into her. He made an anguished sound and then his mouth was on her mouth, claiming her, devouring all she had to offer him. He could live for eternity on such a feast.

Once said, Claire found she had no other words. Just those three, tumbling from her tongue, over and over and over again.

“ _IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou… Oh God Jamie, I love you._ ”

He rose up high on his hands and slammed into her at a pace that shook the bed and her body with it. Her climax rippled, deep and hot from the very centre of her, right up through her abdomen until her nipples were throbbing. She was breathless and raw, her nerves wrecked and overstimulated. Yet still his body called to her, yet still her body responded.

“Look at me,” he commanded gruffly. “Look at me while I take ye, while ye tremble around my cock. I want to see yer eyes when I pour myself into ye, for ye are mine, Sassenach. Mine alone, and I will no suffer the memory of any other man’s hand upon ye.”

She did look at him then and saw the storm of emotions in his eyes. He was a wild thing, borne of wind and rain that howled within him. The muscles of his arms were like oak trees and bulged with the effort to keep him upright.

She wound her palm around his neck and found purchase in the damp curls at his nape. She pulled him to her with the cup of her hand and fucked herself back onto him with the bowl of her hips. When he had lowered himself enough that she could wrap her legs around his back she moved her hands to his buttocks and dug her fingers into the solid flesh.

“Now, Jamie, now! Come to me!” she panted in his ear and bit his shoulder where it joined his neck, not to break the skin but to mark him as hers. Jamie gasped loudly and then he was calling her name, over and over, “Claire, Claire, Claire, Jesus God, Claire!” He went ramrod straight, and for three labourious beats of her heart he didn’t move at all. It was as if time itself had stopped, but then the tension rolled from his body in one curling wave and he crumpled on top of her, limp and spent.

Claire held him, savouring the weight of him on her, the feel of him still inside her.

They stayed that way, bound and whole, deep into the night.

* * *

Jamie did not know how long he lay in her arms but he moved only when her leg began to cramp from holding him. Though they were bone tired with exhaustion, they did not sleep. Instead they lay side by side in the bed, heads tucked under arms and around pillows, whispering in the dark.

“And you and Frank never shared a bed… after?” he asked.

“We did… but less frequently as time past. There wasn’t much joy in it for either of us. Too many ghosts lay with us, I think.”

“Me, ye mean?” She stroked his cheek lovingly, “Yes, you… But there were our own ghosts, too. We became very good at hurting each other and never quite managed to learn how to stop. It took its toll.”

He fumbled for her hand in the darkness and held it to his chest so she could feel the beat of his heart. He thought of Frank and Laoghaire and all the others who had been wounded or worse because of they love they shared.

“I had not thought before this night of the cost others have paid because of the love we bear each other.”

“Jamie-” she began, but he cut her off.

“Do you think we shall pay for it? For the pain we have caused and don’t repent?”

She did not respond immediately, but silently held his gaze, letting him see her entirely.

“Perhaps,” she said, quietly.

_War loomed long and deadly before them._

“Maybe we have already.”

_At their back lay twenty years of heartbreak that would forever echo through their bones._

“Maybe we are paying for it, still.”

_Malva Christie’s wicked lies, threatening all they held dear._

Before Jamie could respond Claire’s voice rang out in the darkness, resolute and defiant.

“Whatever the cost, I will pay it. I won’t be parted from you again, James Fraser. Not in this life, nor the next.”

Jamie kissed her then and enfolded her completely into his arms, “Och but ye are a fierce wee thing, Sassenach.”

She smiled at him faintly.

“Blood of my blood,” she whispered.

“Bone of my bone,” came his reply.

He kissed her once more, and then finally, just as a new day broke, they slept.


End file.
